Chimpanzee brain morphometry utilizing standardized MRI preprocessing and macroanatomical annotations
- Research Centre Jülich, Germany
- MD Anderson Center, United States
- The George Washington University, United States
- Georgia State University, United States
- University of Jena, Germany
- Jena University Hospital, Germany
Abstract
Chimpanzees are among the closest living relatives to humans and, as such, provide a crucial comparative model for investigating primate brain evolution. In recent years, human brain mapping has strongly benefited from enhanced computational models and image processing pipelines that could also improve data analyses in animals by using species-specific templates. In this study, we use structural MRI data from the National Chimpanzee Brain Resource (NCBR) to develop the chimpanzee brain reference template Juna.Chimp for spatial registration and the macro-anatomical brain parcellation Davi130 for standardized whole-brain analysis. Additionally, we introduce a ready-to-use image processing pipeline built upon the CAT12 toolbox in SPM12, implementing a standard human image preprocessing framework in chimpanzees. Applying this approach to data from 194 subjects, we find strong evidence for human-like age-related gray matter atrophy in multiple regions of the chimpanzee brain, as well as, a general rightward asymmetry in brain regions.
Data availability
The T1-weighted MRI's can are available at the National Chimpanzee Brain Resource Website as well as the direct-to-download dataset we used for our example workflow.The code used in the manuscript can be found at this GitHub repo https://github.com/viko18/JunaChimp
Article and author information
Author details
Felix Hoffstaedter
Funding
Helmholtz Association (Helmholtz Portfolio Theme 'Supercomputing and Modelling for the Human Brain)
- Sam Vickery
- Simon B Eickhoff
- Felix Hoffstaedter
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (417649423)
- Robert Dahnke
European Commission Horizon 2020 (945539 (HBP SGA 3))
- Sam Vickery
- Simon B Eickhoff
- Felix Hoffstaedter
Helmholtz Association (Initiative and Networking Fund)
- Svenja Caspers
European Commission Horizon 2020 (785907 (HBP SGA 2))
- Svenja Caspers
National Institutes of Health (NS-42867,NS-73134,NS-92988)
- William D Hopkins
National Institutes of Health (NS092988)
- Chet C Sherwood
James S. McDonnell Foundation (220020293)
- Chet C Sherwood
Inspire Foundation (SMA-1542848)
- Chet C Sherwood
National Institutes of Health (U42-OD011197)
- Steven J Schapiro
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: The chimpanzee imaging data were acquired under protocols approved by the Yerkes National Primate Research Center (YNPRC) at Emory University Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (Approval number YER2001206).
Copyright
© 2020, Vickery et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Chimpanzee brain morphometry utilizing standardized MRI preprocessing and macroanatomical annotations
eLife 9:e60136.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.60136
Further reading
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Recognizing and responding to threat cues is essential to survival. Freezing is a predominant threat behavior in rats. We have recently shown that a threat cue can organize diverse behaviors beyond freezing, including locomotion (Chu et al., 2024). However, that experimental design was complex, required many sessions, and had rats receive many foot shock presentations. Moreover, the findings were descriptive. Here, we gave female and male Long Evans rats cue light illumination paired or unpaired with foot shock (eight total) in a conditioned suppression setting using a range of shock intensities (0.15, 0.25, 0.35, or 0.50 mA). We found that conditioned suppression was only observed at higher foot shock intensities (0.35 mA and 0.50 mA). We constructed comprehensive temporal ethograms by scoring 22,272 frames across 12 behavior categories in 200-ms intervals around cue light illumination. The 0.50 mA and 0.35 mA shock-paired visual cues suppressed reward seeking, rearing, and scaling, as well as light-directed rearing and light-directed scaling. These shock-paired visual cues further elicited locomotion and freezing. Linear discriminant analyses showed that ethogram data could accurately classify rats into paired and unpaired groups. Using complete ethogram data produced superior classification compared to behavior subsets, including an immobility subset featuring freezing. The results demonstrate diverse threat behaviors – in a short and simple procedure – containing sufficient information to distinguish the visual fear conditioning status of individual rats.
